Grief was a luxury only the living could afford. And even the living couldn't afford it here.
They marched north on a grey morning, two hundred soldiers in a column that should have been three hundred, the gaps in the line present and unclosed, like missing teeth. No one remarked on the gaps. The officers at the column's edge did not remark on them. The official count, per the reassignment order, was the pre-battle number — the padded number — which meant the gaps were not officially there, which meant the dead were not officially dead, which meant they had died the way they had lived in the Low Quarter: outside the count that mattered.
Kael marched and kept his eyes forward and felt the grief sitting in him like something swallowed wrong that he had not yet found a moment to address. He was aware of it. He would not call what he was doing suppression — suppression implies force, implies the thing pushing back. This was more like postponement. A promise to himself that the grief was real and would be honored, at a time when honoring it would not get him or anyone else killed.
He was not sure that time would come. He was marching toward conditions in which it was even less likely to come. He marched anyway.
It was Bren who said Sorin's name for the first time since the battle.
He said it simply, in the middle of the march, in the quiet stretch between two ridges where the column fell into its rhythm and conversation became possible in the low private way of people who are walking and not yet fighting.
"Sorin would have had something to say about this road," Bren said.
The road was bad. Rutted and waterlogged, the kind that sucked at your boots and added a private argument to every step.
Kael thought about it. "He would have named it," he said. "Given it a terrible name."
"The Misery Corridor," Orren offered from behind them.
"Too grand," Ysse said. "He would have picked something smaller. More personal. The Boot-Eater."
"The Boot-Eater," Bren repeated. He said nothing else for a while. Then: "I miss him."
"Yes," Kael said.
"Me too," said Ysse.
"Yes," said Orren.
They marched on. The road pulled at their boots. Above them the sky was the same indifferent grey it had been since the valley, offering nothing. The gaps in the column stayed open. The grief stayed where it was — present, real, carefully set aside, waiting for a door that might not open.
They gave it the only thing they had to give it: they said his name. In the middle of a bad road on the way to another bad place, they said his name, and it was not enough, and it was something.